People's Communes Set Up In 90 Per Cent of Tibet's Townships

Tibet's agriculture and livestock breeding have undergone socialist transformation in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Today, people's communes have been set. up in more than 90 per cent of the townships in Tibet, an epoch-making transformation in the region. (Before the establishment of the people's communes, the township was the basic unit of state power in China.) After putting down the armed rebellion launched by the Dalai traitorous clique in 1959, the Tibetan people, under the leadership of the Party and Chairman Mao, earned out the democratic reform and thoroughly smashed the reactionary and brutal feudal serf system under which the serf-owners, who made up less than 5 per cent of the total population, owned all the land and the bulk of the livestock, while the masses of serfs and slaves were regarded as "beasts that could talk”. After the democratic reform, the million emancipated serfs joined the rest of the Chinese people as masters of the country. They set up more than 20,000 mutual-aid teams which were of a rudimentary socialist nature, and achieved good results in both agriculture and livestock breeding in the following years. With the development of production, peasants and herdsmen eagerly demanded that people's communes be set up. Some people's communes were set up on an experimental basis in 1965 at selected places in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Since the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began in 1966. Chairman Mao's revolutionary line has struck a deeper chord in the hearts of the people. The peasants' and herdsmen's enthusiasm for socialism led to a high tide in establishing people's communes, and Party organizations at all levels set about the task in a planned way. The state, by way of help, provided the funds and materials needed. The people's communes have further liberated the productive forces, thus promoting the rapid growth of agriculture and animal husbandry. In 1973, 90 percent of the people's communes increased their production, and total grain output in the whole region more than doubled that of 1959 while the number of livestock doubled. In the course of setting up and consolidating and developing the people's communes, a great number of Tibetan cadres at the basic level have matured. More than 11,000 Tibetans hare been, admitted into the Party from 1972 to 1973. Party organizations, and revolutionary committees have been established in all the communes. Poor and lower-middle peasants’ (herdsmen's) associations and women's, youth and militia organizations have also been founded.